A new blog post from AMD's Senior PR Manager, Phil Hughes, tells us that the new improved APU's are shipping in preparation for launch:

Great news AMD fans, our second-generation AMD A-Series APU (codenamed: “Trinity”) began shipping last quarter – putting the best video and gaming experiences and superior battery life one step closer to your fingertips!

The 2012 AMD A-Series APU helps improve on virtually every aspect of our current A-Series APUs while doubling the performance-per-watt over our previous generation. It enables Brilliant HD, amazing productivity and accelerated applications across a spectrum of form factors – including ultrathin and mainstream notebooks, embedded devices and desktops.

Not to be outdone, our new essential notebook platform codenamed “Brazos 2.0” also began shipping to OEMs last quarter! It builds on the success of our highly successful 2011 Low Power Platform, bringing many new features, excellent performance and extended battery life to entry-level products.

Stay tuned: “Trinity” and “Brazos 2.0” systems will be available globally soon!

AMD's Trinity APU will go head to head with Intel's Ivy Bridge design, where the companies difference in speciailty will be thrown into sharp contrast - parallel processing power vs. single thread performance. While both chips incorporate graphics hardware, Intel's Ivy Bridge is estimated to match the current bottom end graphics add-in boards from AMD - meaning the year-old APU design, Llano, will be faster for gaming and GPU accelerated applications. Trinity raises the bar, especially with it's rumored support for dual graphics with AMD Radeon 7000 series 'Cape Verde' chips.

The showdown between Ivy Bridge and Trinity will be fought not on the benchmark pages but in the user experience ratings, a place where AMD's superior graphics performance and drivers may prove critical. Secondly, price will be a factor - to beat Trinity, OEM's using Intel's Ivy Bridge will have to add a discrete GPU to their design; adding cost and heat while reducing battery life, and being confronted with Dual Graphics configurations from AMD that offer more performance once again.